Gourmet Girls on Air!

You all know us as the Gourmet Girls on Fire, but what happens when we take to the radio waves? We become the Gourmet Girls on Air! We’re working on our stow away skills so we can add the Gourmet Girls on Water to our resume.

A few weeks ago we had the opportunity to go on Elizabeth Stewart’s fabulous talk radio show Coast to Coast (10am Fridays) on Santa Barbara’s KZSB 1290 to talk about The Gourmet Girls Go Camping Cookbook! It was a great time. Elizabeth was fantastic, and we wanted to share the interview with our fabulous fans. This version has been edited down to 16 minutes from the original 45-minute interview. Below you can find the mp3 recording and a transcript with links and photos of what we’re discussing. It’s our ‘best of’ from the interview, and we sure hope you’ll enjoy listening to it (or reading it) as much as we enjoyed recording it 🙂

KZSB radio interview with transcript below:

Welcome to the Arts and Antique Radio Show where your host, nationally recognized certified appraiser, Elizabeth Stewart, Santa Barbara’s treasure sleuth, will help you put a value on the treasures in your own home.

[music]

So let’s find out, how valuable is it?

Elizabeth Stewart:

Hello hello hello! Santa Barbara! It’s your chantress of everything valuable and beautiful, Elizabeth Stewart. You know, a while back we did a show with Gail Kearns and Penny Paine about book publishing and how to write your book, and this sort of thing. We had so many good emails that I got in touch with Gail Kearns again and asked her what she was working on. And lo and behold! She is working on a fantastic book in collaboration with her girls, Gourmet Girls on Fire and the book is a cookbook. And it’s a cookbook about how to cook well when you’re camping. It’s called The Gourmet Girls Go Camping. It is in the last of the production stage and right now they’re crowdsourcing for funding.

I had the opportunity to glance over it last night. If you guys can picture this, you know this is outside, they’re making these things. For breakfast; apricot pecan pancakes with maple blackberry syrup, Basque frittata, eggs benedict, grilled trout wrapped in bacon, individual French omelets, peach and lemon French toast, quinoa breakfast skillet, it goes on and on! Then we have lunch, then we have the main course. They were showing me this picture of a thirteen pound salmon and they wrapped and put all sorts of onions and spices and wrapped it and did this all on the campfire.

Not only that, there’s a wonderful section, I think probably my favorite which is, how to make cocktails as you’re camping! And I have to say it’s a beautiful idea. It really is.

Denise Woolery:
Well, we all got together and we’ve all been cooking gourmet meals for ourselves and for our families. It started out actually with potlucks over at each other’s homes and then we started an annual paella party where we do a big paella. It just kept going until we started making camping trips out of it. We didn’t stop with the gourmet meals we just kept creating new things and it’s evolved since then.

Elizabeth Stewart:

About how many girls camp with you guys?

Gail Kearns:

Well there are a core group of like eight of us, and we’ve had more than that over the years but some of our gourmet girls have moved out of town.

Elizabeth Stewart:

And where do you… where are your favorite campsites?

Gail Kearns:

My favorite place is Ventana Campground in Big Sur. That’s where we did most of the recipe testing.
Elizabeth Stewart:

That’s wonderful! So how much gear do you have to pack in?

Denise Woolery:

It’s definitely car camping. We’re not backpacking into the woods.

Elizabeth Stewart:

I see.

Denise Woolery:

We have cast iron Dutch ovens that we can bake in and do wonderful meals like coq au vin and short ribs and [other] great recipes. So those are quite heavy.

Elizabeth Stewart:

Tell me a little bit about this, the gear up section in the book. So tell me a little bit, what’s the camp kitchen look like?

Gail Kearns:

Both Denise and I have this set up where we have a Coleman stove type deal on top of our camp kitchen. We all have coolers. We have this gadget that is like your faucet at home that you pull out to spray the dishes, to rinse dishes with when we’re finished cooking. We have tubs for washing. I’ve got an incredible amount of spices with special boxes for the spices to go in.

Denise Woolery:

Yeah, and then we have cast iron griddles that we can put right over the campfire. I also bring a Tuscan grill, it’s called, which is a fold up grill top because I can put my cast iron griddle on top of that and then just hover it right down over the fire, and we’re good to go!

Elizabeth Stewart:

That’s wonderful! I actually want Lindsey to read a little bit of a specific recipe. What is it?

Lindsey Moran:

It’s called gun butt coffee.

Elizabeth Stewart:

Gun butt coffee and, yeah I know, it sounds fantastic, and the recipe is so delightfully written that you guys have got to hear it out there in radio land. So, Lindsey Moran is the wonderful designer and artist who did the whole design for the book and the layout, and just a delightful sort of retro feel to it. Almost 50’s / 60’s with the little ladies in their delightful little bell skirts and their aprons cooking happily over the campfire. Reminds me of sort of the Betty Crockers of old. Lindsey’s going to read us the recipe in the book for gun butt coffee. Take it away, Lindsey.

Lindsey Moran:

So the gun butt coffee recipe is actually sort of in here almost as a little bit of a joke, because it’s not necessarily the best coffee you’re going to come across. But it sure was fun, so we had to include it. So here it is, gun butt coffee aka cowboy coffee. We put this in here, it says right at the top:

Just for the hell of it, here’s the good, the bad and the ugly about making cowboy coffee.

Ingredients include

Coffee

Water

Fire

The butt of a rifle

Half a flask of whiskey

Bring one quart of water to a boil in a saucepan or pot. Grind coffee by crushing whole beans with the butt of a rifle. Watch the beans fly in all directions. Add ¾ cup of ground coffee. Return to boil. Immediately remove from the heat and cover. Wait till the grounds sink (approximately 5 minutes). They probably won’t sink. Serve it anyway. Add half a flask of whiskey, because you’re going to need to help with that bitterness.

Elizabeth Stewart:

Yes, only for that reason, right? [laughing] Isn’t that fantastic! You know and that’s sort of the ridiculous, but we also get to the sublime in this book too. I mean, all for carnivores is a section: beef and Padroné pepper skewers with spice salt and chimichurri sauce, the best blue cheese burger ever is another example, bison chili, braised short ribs. You know, Denise was in the green room telling me that the braised short ribs was her recipe, tell us about that, Denise. What’s the braised short ribs like?

Denise Woolery:

Well it’s a really easy recipe, which I know people that are camping really want. You don’t want to have to fuss around too much. It all happens in the Dutch oven. You get some short ribs and you salt and pepper them and you braise them really quickly in there on a high heat. Then start adding…

Elizabeth Stewart:

May I interrupt?

Denise Woolery:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Stewart:

When you say a high heat, are you stoking the coals to get it to a certain heat?

Denise Woolery:

Yes. We have a little method that we do where we start a campfire and then we add coals to that campfire and we keep a fire burning to the side of the Dutch oven. Which goes pretty much directly into the fire on top of some coals. So we can keep the fire going, stoking, keep adding coals, and then pull the coals that we need out. Then you put some on top once all the ingredients are in the Dutch oven. You can regulate the heat inside by the number of coals you place on the bottom and the top of the Dutch oven. So you can even bake a cake in there. But we haven’t attempted that yet. That’s next.

Gail Kearns:

We did, however, do a peach cobbler one night.

Denise Woolery:

We did do a peach cobbler, yes.

Elizabeth Stewart:

Go back to your short ribs actually, so then I also want to ask. When you’re doing that main course are you also, like you have maybe six rings on a stove, are you also doing other things? Or is it one item at a time when you’re cooking?

Denise Woolery:

Oh, you can do multiple things because, well, the short ribs take a couple of hours to cook. So once you’ve put all the ingredients in and you put the coals on top, you can pretty much walk away from that for a couple of hours while it cooks. In the mean time you have your camp stove, which is usually only two burners, but plenty. You know, it’s enough. You also have your side fire. So you can be doing something on the side fire, and on the camp stove at the same time.

Elizabeth Stewart:

So if you’re doing the braised short ribs, what else are you serving as sides? For example, what does a whole meal look like if it’s a braised short ribs for main course?

Denise Woolery:

Well we could have some boiled potatoes, or you could wrap them in foil and throw them on the fire, and do them that way if you didn’t want to boil some water. A green salad. We have many, many vegetable sides. We can grill artichokes.

Elizabeth Stewart:

Oh, fantastic!

Denise Woolery:

We have many, many options in the book for sides.

Elizabeth Stewart:

Coal roasted eggplants, grilled fingerling potatoes, haricot vert with shitake mushrooms and pine nuts. You know this is more the language. Not hard tack and, you know, trail mix.

I want to talk about you’re really interesting marketing. I mentioned to Gail in an email last night, I wanted to focus on this because I think the people that listened to Gail’s last program would be interested to know. Once the book was thought of and the delightful recipes were put down to paper, what’s next? So let’s talk about that when we get back from the break. Don’t turn that dial back with Lindsey Moran, Denise Woolery, and Gail Kearns!

[Music break: hilarious instrumental song about making a compass from a yellow jelly bean and a life size replica of Keanu Reeves from a pile of leaves.]

Elizabeth Stewart:

What! Richard what is that? That’s fantastic! Make a compass out of a yellow jelly bean. That’s great! And a life size sculpture of Keanu Reeves. That is fantastic! You always find the best! You always find the best.

So we’re talking about a book that Gail brought to my attention. She’s one of about eight gourmet girls that have camped since 1996 together, and made over the years compilations of the recipes that work as you’re camping. Of course it’s car camping. It’s not packing in and packing out. But my gosh, the recipes in the book. It’s called the Gourmet Girls Go Camping it’s a cookbook. It’s about two, between two and three hundred pages as I looked at it last night. And delightfully illustrated. There’s some really good sections that I think are super important. Of course, what to camp in with. What to bring. How to arrange the campsite. The kind of hints that Denise is giving us about cooking with various utensils, such as Dutch ovens. How the coals go, etcetera. The advice not to use, maybe, the grate that’s there at the campsite, but to bring your own. How to wash the dishes, even! So this is a great how to book.

Now Gail, the marketing part. The latest email I got last night was: It’s eBook time. The Gourmet Girls on fire have contemplated our next step for realizing our small business dream of becoming the go to source for camping with style and ease. So we’re going to put first an eBook and use it as a crowdfunding source of your own. Placing all profits from eBook sales into a savings account and let it build until you girls have enough to send our book to print. Now, we’re realistic, you write, and it’ll take a while to do this. The print cost alone is $13,500 for our full color 224 page cookbook. But we’re in it for the long haul.

Gail Kearns:

Yeah. We did our research, and we know that the book will appeal to campers. But also RVers, tailgaters, I mean there’s a whole lot of people out there who will be interested in the book.

Lindsey Moran:

Yeah, it should be stated as well that all of these recipes can be made at home. You know, you don’t necessarily have to do it in a Dutch oven, you can just stick it in the regular oven.

Elizabeth Stewart:

We talked a little bit about how to get the book out. So now you’ve got this idea of the platform. What do you do with social media behind that?

Lindsey Moran:

We’ve set up a Twitter, and a Facebook, and an Instagram, and stuff like that. We just make sure to keep people interested. We find articles on line that we like, and we share those. We’ve also posted a couple of the recipes from the book as, sort of, teasers to get people interested. We’re also just letting them know what’s going on with our Kickstarter campaign, when it was running. Now we’re letting them know about the next phase, which is the eBook and the PayPal donation option. So it’s a way to, sort of, get people interested and then keep them interested.

Elizabeth Stewart:

Give me an example. With one specific recipe, any of you three girls, with one specific recipe were you thinking, okay, let’s add this because we can do this with that?

Lindsey Moran:

Anything in the Dutch oven. We’ve been doing our research, we found this Dutch Oven Society. And I mean there are people who are very enthusiastic. Facebook groups dedicated to cast iron cooking. I mean there’s just very, very specific things. Any recipe we have that has a Dutch oven listed, you know, we can market those to the Dutch Oven Society. Then there’s also the Wonderbag. Which we haven’t even touched on yet.

Elizabeth Stewart:

Wonderbag?

Lindsey Moran:

Yeah, it’s this great big puffy insulated bag that acts as a slow cooker that you don’t need any electricity for at all. You heat up your meal, put the whole pot inside of this big bag put the lid on synch it closed. And you go out and do whatever you’re going to do, hike for the whole day, and you come back it’s still steaming hot at the end of the day. It’s amazing!

I don’t know what the insulation is. It’s actually been developed by a woman in South Africa. It’s based on the way her mother used to cook. In like a big box with a lot of hay or whatever around it. So she decided that she would come up with a more modern looking device.

Lindsey Moran:

And actually any time you buy one I think that they also give one, it’s like Toms, they donate one to a family in need, which is kind of cool!

Gail Kearns:

Yes, when you buy a Wonderbag they donate one to a family in need in Africa.

Elizabeth Stewart:

Wow! That’s so interesting because you know when you think of like, I called my mother in law the old bag. [Laughing] You know. It’s sort of like a tie in with the women. So all of us Wonderbags are doing Wonderbag cooking. [Laughter] The Gourmet Girls outdoors, ah yes, experience! [Laughter]

Well thank you, you three for being on with us! It’s Lindsey Moran, Denise Woolery, and Gail Kearns with their new book The Gourmet Girls Go Camping. And I just want to give you the way to get in touch with them. You want to email the Gourmet Girls it’s gourmetgirlsonfire@gmail.com. And here again if you want to take a look at the Facebook page we have www.facebook.com/gourmetgirlsonfire. Thank you, all three of you and good luck with Gourmet Girls Go Camping!